MacKinnon’s Painted Cave

I was looking at our Davaar book last night (almost a year since it was published) and thinking about what some of you were saying in response to my last post about producing a book in which Tom and I collaborated, creating a picture of a landscape, in words and images. This was very much the idea behind Davaar (which like many of our books also includes the bonus of a collection of knitting patterns) and which is the kind of book I am sure we are going to produce more of as time goes on. As I looked through Davaar, I thought those of you who have not seen this book might enjoy reading one of its essays, a piece which is my favourite among all the many things I researched, wrote and published in 2023. It’s about the cultural context and significance of a work of art, and its place in the landscape I am now lucky enough to call home. It’s a fairly long piece, so you might want to save it for your weekend reading. I do hope you enjoy it!

Makinnon’s Painted Cave

One day in August 1887, a yachting party landed at Davaar island to have a break and stretch their legs. Wandering across the rocky foreshore to the interesting group of caves dotted along the cliffside, one of them struck a match, looked up, and was amazed. For high above them, in the damp and gloom, they had seen the face of Christ, gazing down from a crucifix that had been painted upon the cave’s rough walls. News of the curious discovery at Davaar quickly spread throughout Kintyre, and, by the following Sunday, crowds of townsfolk had gathered by the Doirlinn, waiting for the next low tide in order to cross the causeway and see the mysterious painted presence for themselves. The candles that they carried with them revealed the story to be true: deep inside the cave, the rocky walls were decorated not simply with moss and lichen but with a large, near-life-sized depiction of Christ upon the cross. The Campbeltown Courier reported the sensational discovery, describing the painting’s setting as the ideal space in which to appreciate it: “nothing could be more suitable for the contemplation of such a subject than the semi-darkness and rocky grandeur of the large cavern in which the picture is placed”. A few weeks later, according to the Oban Times,several thousand visitors had already made a trip to south Kintyre to see the painted cave, and those chartering small boats for hire around Davaar were doing a roaring trade. But about the artwork’s origins confusion reigned. How on earth had this evidently modern cave painting been completed, and by whom? And what would be the response of local churches? Might the crucifixion cave be proclaimed, in fact, a miracle? Campbeltown’s civic, if not its religious, leaders quickly predicted the transformation of Davaar island into a place of spiritual pilgrimage. The benefits to the community might be considerable, enthused the then town sheriff, Russell Bell, if the painted cave came to be venerated “as a sacred Lourdes”. 

 In some ways (though not perhaps in others), what Bell predicted came to pass. For, in the century and a half since its production, many thousands of people have walked across the Doirlinn, following the now well-trodden path to Davaar’s painted cave. At low tide on any sunny summer’s day, you’ll see, spread out and dotted across the causeway, a train of slowly moving figures, all engaged upon the same pedestrian pilgrimage to view the image of Christ upon the cross. Since the 1880s, then, Davaar’s painted cave has acted as a curious marker in the landscape of Kintyre, a local attraction, a place to walk to, a thing to come and see. For some, no doubt, their journey to the cave has a straightforward spiritual explanation, but for many others it does not. What is it about Davaar’s painted cave that has made it into such a place of popular resort, an enduring and familiar destination for those of faith and those of none alike? How did the painting get there, and why was it produced? Might different audiences, at different moments, respond rather differently to its presence? How does this thing—an artefact created by one human, for one set of reasons, and preserved and modified by others, for other reasons—transform our experience of the cave and the island landscape within which it sits? What acts of memory, of tribute, or devotion, might this space invite? A material object, a curious relic, an impromptu shrine: what do we make of the painted cave?

Signature

After a brief period of speculation regarding its “miraculous” appearance in 1887, it did not take long for the real origins of the painted cave come to light. A local man, Archibald MacKinnon, revealed that he’d created it, and provided documentary evidence in the form of photographs which showed him engaged upon the production of the work. According to MacKinnon’s testimony in the Courier, “the body of our saviour on the cross shortly after his passion” was a subject which he had “long had at heart”. He described how he had been prompted to recreate the image following a vivid dream, which had also guided him to the precise location in the Davaar cave in which his painting was to be produced.

 But who was Archibald MacKinnon? After his first admission of authorship, and the published testimony about his dream, the artist fell completely silent about his crucifixion painting—understandably, perhaps, given the nature of the attacks that ensued upon his work and character. MacKinnon is often described as an “art teacher”—but, because that role’s range of associations was somewhat different in the 1880s from what it is today, the impression we might have of him as a man of middle-class, professional position is misleading. Born Archibald “MacKinven” in Campbeltown in 1849, he was an ordinary working man, of very ordinary background, but with considerable individual endeavour and ambition. His father was lost at sea, and his mother claimed parish poor relief until moving to Glasgow to find work when her son was ten years old. The family name was altered to “MacKinnon”, and young Archibald was apprenticed to Neilson & Co. (later, the Clyde Locomotive Company) in Springburn, where he began to work on a large railway manufacturing site. Through the open-access evening courses that were then available to working people at Glasgow School of Art, MacKinnon was able to learn mechanical drawing, draughtsmanship and some principles of painting and composition. Glasgow School of Art was then (as now) a vibrant, interesting and inclusive creative hub—and, increasingly finding painting more inspiring than heavy industry, MacKinnon decided to try to make a go of art as a business. So, he returned home to Campbeltown—a place which, despite its small size, was rapidly becoming known for producing internationally well-regarded and well-established landscape artists like William McTaggart and John Campbell Mitchell. As an artist in Campbeltown, MacKinnon was neither well regarded nor ever particularly well established. He certainly taught painting after establishing what he advertised as his own art “school”—an interesting small commercial enterprise, and a logical one too, perhaps, in a place of popular summer resort whose picturesque coastal scenery increasingly attracted holidaying amateurs. But there’s not much evidence that MacKinnon’s creative business venture ever really got off the ground. Alongside his teaching work, he pursued his own practice, producing genre paintings and local scenes in a style that was wonderfully joyous and energetic, but which, to polite audiences in the 1880s, might also have seemed somewhat folksy or proletarian. Then, in 1887, he had a dream, following the promptings of which he painted Christ’s crucifixion in a well-known cave. After this, Archibald MacKinnon certainly found fame as an artist—though perhaps not in quite the way that he might have wanted.

“The face of a ruffian”

In creating his crucifixion scene, MacKinnon had made a highly visible, and potentially highly contentious, mark in his local landscape. He had done so without reference to property or land ownership, to any power structure civic or religious, or by seeking any form of permission or assent. He had simply had a dream, and he had felt compelled to paint it. But he had done so in such a curious manner, and in such an unusual and particular form of public space, that attention was bound to be drawn to the working-class artist as much as to his highly visible work of art. And, for some of Campbeltown’s uppity, bourgeois residents, this was what seemed to be the problem. To them, the painting seemed less an act of Christian devotion than it did a deed of defacement, a personal signature in a public place, a crude telling to the world that “I, Archibald MacKinnon, was here”. A vocal local minority saw MacKinnon’s painting less in terms of its remarkable achievement (the painting was produced in the dark of a cave, and at a considerable distance from Mackinnon’s body, with brushes tied to extended sticks), nor in terms of its sheer creative brio (who just goes ahead and creates a life-sized crucifixion in a cave?), nor as a claiming of space for devotion or ritual (a community practice which had been common, as we’ll see, around coastal Kintyre for many centuries). They simply saw it as an act of shameless and unseemly personal aggrandisement—and they didn’t like it.

Once MacKinnon revealed his identity, the local mood quickly shifted from one of speculative excitement to vitriol and ire. One letter to the Courier disparaged the photographs MacKinnon had arranged to document his authorship of the work as “a moment of egotism and vanity strangely illustrated”. Another correspondent pulled no punches in attacking MacKinnon himself, describing his desire for notoriety as the “insane cravings of a morbid appetite” which had, from the publicity surrounding his painting, finally been “gratified”. MacKinnon was, his critics argued, promoting himself rather than his faith, and, in so doing, demeaning Christianity in an image that they condemned as a “burlesque of the crucifixion”, with “the face of a ruffian”, which did not “possess a single redeeming feature”. “Defective alike in conception and execution,” the anonymous critic sneered, “vulgarity is writ large in every tone and tint and line of the production.” Was the real problem for MacKinnon’s enemies, then, that they simply felt his painting wasn’t very good? That his was the art of the street and the people, rather than that of the gallery or cathedral? Certainly, much of the extraordinary hostility that was directed at MacKinnon seemed to be about his social status, and was tinged with evident class prejudice: “he cannot paint higher than his own level,” one critic dismissively concluded, “and Mr MacKinnon’s level is … pretty low”.

If Archibald MacKinnon’s artistic rise to fame was fast, then his fall from grace was even faster. Campbeltown was (and is) a small place: a place in which it would be difficult to exist as a notorious town pariah. Overwhelmed by negative local reaction, MacKinnon left Kintyre and returned to the old work he knew, exchanging the engine yards of Glasgow for those of Liverpool.

Kitsch

To those in Campbeltown of rarefied tastes and refined sensibilities, then, MacKinnon’s crucifixion seemed little more than kitschy spectacle. And, intriguingly, the assumed “vulgarity” of the work was an issue that had recently been raised by critics of similar temperament in relation to another depiction of exactly the same subject: Mihály Munkácsy’sChrist upon Golgotha (1887). In fact, when MacKinnon’s painting was discovered in the cave, it was assumed by its first viewers to be an explicit copy of Munkácsy’s crucifixion. (“Visitors to Island Davaar recently have been surprised to find on the rocky walls of one of the caves on the south-west side of the island a painting supposed to be a reproduction of Munkácsy’s famous picture of Christ on Calvary recently on view in Glasgow” stated the Campbeltown Courier in its first report). The association with Munkácsy was quickly reinforced by subsequent visitors to Davaar—and, around Campbeltown, rumours had begun to spread that the famous Hungarian artist had recently been spotted visiting Davaar, secretly landing on the island “coming out of Mr MacFarlane’s yacht”. That the then internationally renowned Munkácsy had created Davaar’s painted cave was, of course, untrue, but the rumour held the weight of possibility, since both the artist and his painting had been the Scottish splash of the summer of 1887. During the recent local “fair” days, crowds in their thousands had enthusiastically queued to see Munkácsy’s work in Glasgow; and, following the exhibition, many more people had seen pictures of Golgotha via the countless inexpensive reproductions that had begun to circulate all over Scotland. It’s entirely possible and, indeed, quite likely that, like many of his neighbours in Kintyre, Archibald MacKinnon had seen Munkácsy’s Golgotha, either in person or on a print or postcard. But, even if he hadn’t seen it, he would certainly have been aware of it, due to the extraordinary sensation the painting and the queues to see it had caused. But why was Munkácsy’s Golgotha such big news in 1887?

Now little known outside his native Hungary, in the summer of 1887 Mihály Munkácsy was probably the most famous contemporary artist in the western world, and it caused a huge local sensation when he brought his work to Glasgow. A transatlantic celebrity, Munkácsy’s work commanded eye-watering prices on the international art market, and his paintings were displayed in contexts that were the late 19th-century equivalent of stadium rock. Following the success of an earlier work Christ Before Pilate (1884), in 1887 Munkácsy had completed Christ Upon Golgotha, the second of his projected triptych of Christ’s passion. What was really remarkable about both Pilate and Golgotha was their huge scale (the Golgotha canvas, for example, was a gigantic 30 feet by 20) and the effect of the size of these pictures on the audiences that viewed them. Under the direction of Munkácsy and his canny manager, these paintings were taken on successful (and highly lucrative) world tours, where they were displayed in industrial cities with sizeable Catholic populations, such as Leeds and Glasgow, always in large venues with specially designed gas lighting that would illuminate the work to best effect. Munkácsy’s human figures were painted at near life-size; and, before the flickering gas lights, the familiar narrative of Christ’s condemnation to death and crucifixion unfolded before the slowly progressing audience like a passion play, at close hand. After queuing for hours to see Munkácsy’s paintings, spectators were sometimes so overwhelmed by fatigue and emotion that they wept or fainted before “art beyond the power of language to describe”. Viewing these paintings was a cinematic spectacle, decades before the age of cinema, and it was a spectacle that millions wanted to pay for and to experience for themselves. “The triumphal progress made by these two pictures through Europe and America has no parallel in the history of art”, Harper’s Weekly claimed, not inaccurately, of Munkácsy’s Pilate and Golgotha, alongside an advertisement offering 21 x 28-inch quality reproductions for a dollar apiece. 

Around the west of Scotland in 1887, then, Munkácsy’s Golgotha had been something like a summer blockbuster, a Jaws or Jurassic Park that everyone had taken a trip to Glasgow to go and see. And, like other forms of popular culture, it was also the easy focus of disdain for those who felt their tastes to be a little different, or perhaps a little more sophisticated, than those of the masses who were so moved and so impressed. Munkácsy’s many sniffy critics dismissed his art as little more than vaudeville, and described the artist himself as a sort of mountebank, dragging Christ around from town to town like an attraction in a raree show. The purportedly “coarse” way that Munkácsy had chosen to represent the face of Christ had also become a particularly controversial topic in 1887, as it was said that he had used his own physique and physiognomy as the model, after having himself bound to, and photographed upon, a mocked-up crucifix.

Just like Munkácsy’s Golgotha (of which it was assumed to be a direct copy), MacKinnon’s crucifixion was essentially condemned for being popular culture. Just like Munkácsy, MacKinnon had painted his Christ at life-size scale, in a position in which the divine figure and face might be encountered in startling close proximity. And, just like Munkácsy’s canvases, MacKinnon’s work was condemned for its kitschy vulgarity, for the purported coarseness of its representation of the subject, as well as for the personal self-aggrandisement by which it was assumed by some to be motivated. The settings of the two artists also had their similarities: in place of Munkácsy’s flickering gas lights and dim hall, MacKinnon had created an intimate experience in a dark cavern, in which his crucifixion might be illuminated by the glimmer of individual candles or lamps. And, rather than queuing in the Glasgow streets and paying for a ticket, those wishing to see MacKinnon’s painting could simply wait for low tide and decent weather to cross, visit the cave, and see the spectacle for themselves. Yet, unlike Mihály Munkácsy (whose tours and ticket sales brought him enormous wealth), Archibald MacKinnon’s work was completely unremunerated: anyone who wanted to could view this extraordinary painting completely for free! In creating his painted cave, then, MacKinnon had essentially taken 1887’s Greatest Show on Earth and, in an act of resourceful ingenuity, reproduced the experience in an unusual location where literally any visitor or local person who was willing to take the time might experience its spectacle. If, as his critics would have had it, MacKinnon’s art was “low”, then it was also highly enterprising, accessible and inclusive. And, confounding its detractors, the painted cave would also go on to achieve its own undeniable and long-lasting popularity.

Uamhach

MacKinnon’s biographical story provides one context for understanding the significance of his crucifixion painting. The 1880s phenomenon of religious art as mass spectacle, as exemplified by the work of Mihály Munkácsy, and the contemporary response to that phenomenon as an expression of popular culture, offers another context. A third context we’ve not yet considered concerns the very particular local environment which housed MacKinnon’s depiction of the crucifixion, and what might be described as one of the key vernacular spaces of south Kintyre: that is, the cave.

Look at any old map of Argyll, and you’ll spot many instances of the word “uamh” dotted around the coast—the Gaelic word for cave. This is certainly a very uamhach landscape, and in mid-Argyll alone there are around 80 examples of caves in which a human presence has been recorded, from the Mesolithic onwards, the majority found in relict cliffs. The sandstone and conglomerate geology of south Kintyre abounds with these dramatic landforms, and the human populations who have shifted and settled around this coastline have always found a use for the caves and rock shelters with which it is indented.

A few miles south of Davaar, at Keil, for example, there’s a series of nine caves close to the rocky outcrop that has since become famous as the location of St Columba’s “footprints”. In 1934, J. Harrison Maxwell’s archaeological investigations inside the largest of these caves brought to light an unusually rich collection of artefacts, revealing evidence of human occupation from the late Iron Age through the early medieval period. Samian ware (Roman pottery), finely worked bone combs, and a Romano-British weaving tablet, all point to occupation of the cave since the third or fourth century CE, while a bronze penannular brooch, glass beads and smelting remains suggest a period of later occupation, and evidence of the cave’s small-scale industrial use as a metal-working shelter. Over the next few hundred years, the Keil cave clearly saw intermittent human occupation and fulfilled a wide range of functions. There are accounts of its use by Irish travelling families in the 1830s; and, in the census of 1881, two households—headed by a tinsmith and a basket-maker—were recorded as its permanent inhabitants. During his 1934 dig, Maxwell noted that simple straw beds and evidence of whisky consumption inside the cave provided evidence of more recent habitation and of the “life and habits of modern cave dwellers”.

Just opposite Davaar, beneath the Achinhoan headland, is another famous cave, which, like the one which houses MacKinnon’s crucifixion painting, is only accessible at low tide. This cave is known as St Ciarán’s cil—the chapel or cell of Ciarán Mac an t-Saor. The founder of Ireland’s famous Clonmacnoise Abbey, St Ciarán and his cave also gave their name to the main settlement of south Kintyre before it was claimed in the 17th century by the Campbells: Ceann Loch Chille Chiarain—that is, the head of the loch by Ciarán’s cil. There are Christian crosses in this cave which pre-date the crucifix that MacKinnon painted by six centuries or more: incised graffiti in the rock face point to its long-term use as a space of liturgy and preaching, while other ritual activity is suggested by carved stone remains including a beautiful boulder featuring a six-petalled marigold cross of a kind produced in many places around Ireland and Scotland between the seventh and 12th centuries. Travelling through Kintyre in the 1770s, Thomas Pennant noted the presence of this “fine” marigold cross and reported that the cave had, in recent memory, been the home of a local elderly couple.

 The domestic use of St Ciarán’s cave in the 18th century wasn’t an anomaly. As Angus Martin reveals in his engaging account in Kintyre: The Hidden Past, caves were resorted to by countless humans seeking simple shelter around the Argyll coast at all times during the modern era, right up to the 20th century’s early decades. The frequent resort of sailors and fishermen, south Kintyre’s caves might see use as unofficial chandleries, as stopping-off or landing points, or as well-known spots to rest and eat. Caves also often played host to travelling communities, to long-term itinerants and weekend coasters, as well as, in some cases, providing forms of permanent residence for well-known characters among the rural poor, such as “Queen Esther” of Southend or Jenny MacCallum of Sunadale, known locally as cailleach na h-uamh (old woman of the cave).

In many different ways, then, the caves of south Kintyre have always marked the everyday passage of human bodies through this coastal landscape over time. And, as Christopher Tolan-Smith shows in his study of The Caves of Mid Argyll, some Kintyre caves were familiarly used as burial places, while others served as staging posts for the dead on their final journey to be laid to rest at Oronsay or Iona. For the living, meanwhile, caves provided simple and convenient spaces of individual domestic and economic activity, as well as lending themselves to communal use as theatres of devotion and shared ritual. These caves, then, have always been south Kintyre’s local landmarks, places of significance to each and every human population that has inhabited the area: “we should not be surprised to find that communities retain strong proprietorial and emotional ties with such significant places,” writes Tolan-Smith, “regardless of ideological orientation”. 

If, in Kintyre, caves have always been “significant places” of human passage and pilgrimage, then perhaps Archibald MacKinnon’s crucifixion painting should simply be seen as a single iteration of an already well-established local vernacular: an informal practice that was completely familiar to the many different communities who had shifted through, and settled in, this landscape over many centuries. Seen in the context of neighbouring caves that are similarly marked with graffiti, reliquiæ and other commemorative objects, MacKinnon’s painting is simply one of many marks and traces, one among many human claims of the space of the Kintyre uamh for devotion, sanctuary or ritual.

Land mark

In 1887, Mackinnon’s critics peevishly anticipated the obliteration of the mark he had made in the landscape: “the enthusiasm will die out. The picture will be forgotten. Moss and lichen and mildew and the kindly influence of the elements will give it a hasty oblivion.” But they were to be proved wrong. For the kitschy religious landmark that an ambitious working-class artist had had the audacity to create simply wouldn’t go away. Ten years later, the painted cave was still drawing visitors and still attracting widespread curiosity. In 1897, for example, “E.T.M.” was “yachting in Scotland” and enjoyed a visit to Davaar’s painted cave. Posting an enquiry in Notes & Queries, they described how, after making local enquiries, they “could get no information as to the name of the artist or when it was painted” and would be “much obliged” for a knowledgeable local correspondent to resolve the matter.

 Over the following decades, knowledge of the presence of Davaar’s curious landmark grew rather than diminished. Due to the effects of water damage, the work itself was increasingly noted to be in need of repair—and so, without any fuss or fanfare, Archibald MacKinnon was persuaded to return to Campbeltown in 1902, to repaint his crucifixion in the Davaar cave. Since leaving Campbeltown, MacKinnon had lived a quiet life: during the First World War, he was called up as a draughtsman to work on the new submarines then being built in Birkenhead. Producing the occasional lively genre painting, just as he’d done in Kintyre, he settled in Nantwich with his wife and daughter, who managed the local wool shop, providing the knitters of Cheshire with yarn, tools and haberdashery supplies. As he became older, the visitors to Davaar just kept on coming, and the popular fame of the landmark he’d created grew and grew.

By 1934, when thousands of visitors were annually making their pilgrimage on foot across the Doirlinn to Davaar, MacKinnon was invited to come home one final time. Having left Campbeltown in disgrace 47 years earlier, he was now afforded a hero’s welcome. When he sailed into the harbour, the press and newsreels were waiting at the quayside, with civic dignitaries, and the local Presbyterian moderator and Catholic priest, standing together, side by side. After being taken to Davaar, the now very elderly MacKinnon ascended a ladder, and with a “sentimental” depiction of the crucifixion (quite possibly Munkácsy’s) to hand for visual reference, he once again reworked his famous painting as the admiring local crowds looked on. Archibald MacKinnon died the following year at home, in Nantwich, at the age of 85.

Reiteration

The painted cave was the work of Archibald MacKinnon, but it is now also an integral part of the landscape of Campbeltown. The nature and position of the painting means that, over intervening years, it has required multiple re-workings and reiterations, which have been completed, in what seems to have become something like an inherited tradition, by local art teachers: John McInally, John McKinnon Crawford, and most recently Ronald Tognieri. Over time, too, other vernacular artists have attempted to appropriate and re-appropriate the space of the painted cave with their own work and additions. In 2006, for example, one artist with spray paint and stencil obscured the features that had once been described in the Campbeltown Courier as “the face of a ruffian” with the image of the Cuban revolutionary Ché Guavara. The outraged response to this “attack” spoke to the profound sense of place of which the painted cave had now become a part, but an alternative reading might note the similarity of tone to contemporary critiques of MacKinnon’s original, which was also once regarded as a grotesque defacement and appropriation of public space. In any case, after a successful restoration campaign, Ché was reincarnated, once again, as Christ at the talented hands of Tognieri, while visitors and vernacular artists alike continued to decorate the painted cave with their own ad-hoc memorial objects and aesthetic acts. In 1997, some local people objected to the gifts and floral tributes that were left in the cave following the death of Princess Diana. A quarter of a century on, others dislike the practice of leaving stones or marks in memory of loved ones, or as simple records of a relationship, event or visit. But doesn’t part of the enduring fascination of a space like the painted cave derive from the fact that the people just keep on coming? And that the more the people come, the more their human presence will be recorded, and indeed, the more the meanings of the space will shift, inevitably, over time?

Archibald Mackinnon created his crucifixion, in a local cave, without commission, without sanction, without permission. His work was never public art, but rather, like other kinds of graffiti, his painting has always acted in the landscape as a kind of counter-monument, an act of inscribing that implicitly asks its own questions of local places, practices and power structures. 

The painted cave asks us what it might mean for a man who had been raised in poverty to return to his home town, to follow his own creative impulses, to appropriate a place, and simply create a work of art. It asks us whether we regard certain kinds of landscape as private or communal spaces—and, if the latter, who has the authority to pass judgement on their meaning or their value. It asks us whether a cave is ever just a cave or whether it might, like the cave of Ciáran, that most unassuming of saints, also be a kind of everyday cathedral. 

As destination, terminus, place of pilgrimage, the cave transports us, asks us where we’d like to go. The cave asks us why we came here, and what we make of it. It asks that we, by simply visiting, become part of the communal work of place-making that Archibald MacKinnon began in 1887 and which continues to this day. For each of us who picks our way across the Doirlinn, who follows the grassy path, who stumbles over boulders, slips on seaweed, peers into each crevice in the cliff in turn, until we too discover the landscape’s not-so-secret secret, is bound together by our shared experience of the painted cave. 

We are connected to the feet and hands of those engaged in its reiteration, like Archibald MacKinnon and Ronald Tognieri, and we are connected to the bodies of all the other visitors, who crane their necks, look upwards, and wait for their eyes to adjust so that they too can properly see the face, the outstretched arms. 

Ömür Harmansah writes of inscribed vernacular spaces, like Davaar, as sites of “desire and futurity” that speak to audiences through acts of “anonymous solidarity”. In each step we take towards the painted cave, we bear witness to its presence, and we respond to the questions the space asks of us, in our own way.

Further reading

Angus Martin, Kintyre: The Hidden Past (1984; 1999; 2014)

Christopher Tolan-Smith, The Caves of Mid Argyll: An Archaeology of Human Use (Society of Antiquaries, 2001) 

Ömür Harmansah, “Graffiti or Monument? Inscription of Place at Anatolian Rock Reliefs”, in Ragazzoli et al., eds, Scribbling Through History (2018) 

This essay is an extract from our Davaar book, available from the KDD shop